As in every election, we hear from those directly or indirectly involved in the fight for votes that this is a “decisive moment” that “the fate of the country for the next 10 or even 20 years” is being played out at the polls. Paradoxically, exaggerating the stake leads to ignoring the real stakes, because this rhetorical exercise, because we hear it every time in an electoral context, fails to convince anyone. This exaggeration, combined with a growing lack of trust in political discourse, leads to a widening gap between the prevailing logic at the level of those who demand the vote and the logic of those who are called to vote. Of course, we will not expect those who govern to think like the governed, but at the moment of election there must be an intersection, or at least a convergence, between the two plans: the theoretical owner of sovereignty, the citizen, has, for the moment, the right to decide, who will manage it. Therefore, it can be expected that, at least on the eve of the elections, the parties will empathize with the actual or potential electorate of each of them. However, parties claim to represent sections of society in order to convince them or at least entice them to vote, they focus on specific issues, produce solutions or purported solutions that meet specific needs. Political competition is not only theoretical, but also practical competition between these decisions, the arbiter of which is the electorate. The proposed solutions are often purely rhetorical, but the voter makes an impression, casts his vote, and the aggregate of these votes creates a small miracle of legitimacy.

The case of Romania is not fundamentally different. Not because we are a great democracy. But because the factory of legitimacy foresees this electoral moment, which, in turn, imposes a number of rules of the game. They can be partially freed from the content or bypassed, but if the electoral moment is exhausted of the content, the generated legitimacy will also tend to zero. The political class needs this legitimization that forces them to play the game one way or another. This does not make the regime truly democratic. In this sense, the example of Romania is indicative: the pumping of purely commercial resources from the media, doubled by their compensation under the scheme Money from the state for parliamentary parties – Money from these parties for the media excludes the “Fourth power in the state” from the game. The consequences for pluralism are devastating between elections, when the crystallization of opposition and a rational alternative becomes impossible, and during elections, because media institutions are no longer the main actor in the necessary intersection, which I mentioned above, between political discourse and voter concerns.

For politicians who channeled money into the media between elections, this channeling of a certain form of corruption of democracy will have a serious negative effect. Now they believe that, in the worst case, these media are losing credibility. They no longer help them, but they cannot successfully oppose them either. In fact, the big loss will be the same parties who resorted to unnatural play. A game that heightens the secretomania typical of the type of regime under President Iohannis. Society is underinformed (to use a euphemism), but this makes it difficult to interpret the signals society wants to send to politicians. The communication channel overlaps in both directions, and politicians enter an election year with a limited understanding of the processes taking place in society.

How can a politician lead a society he does not understand? At the level of parties, as well as candidates for the post of president, this misunderstanding is obvious and makes us say that the very moment of the elections this year is perceived by the governors not as a chance for re-legitimization, but as a crisis. in itself . Crisis of ideas, programs, political identity. Obviously, a crisis of leaders, a crisis of coherent strategy and therefore of trust: there have never been more media scenes, more places to express and multiply political discourse, but there has never been a sense of inadequacy or even a political vacuum, the lack of alternatives has never been higher. Look at these channels, from television to friendly sites that apparently go through social media: politicians talk almost exclusively about themselves. And not because they are all narcissists, but because they have nothing more to say.

Politics between elections was reduced to a grand bazaar of petty personal vanities. But the bazaar is empty. There are no buyers. Most polls don’t tell us how many voters have political preferences. The PSD prides itself on having 30%, but if you look closely, it has less than a third to a half of those polled, even if the percentage of those expressing their choice tends to increase in the run-up to the election. Many of those who say they definitely want to vote are still in the category of those who do not yet have a political choice. Expect something from the parties, maybe expect a miracle. Waiting for Godot. Which does not come, but the election moment is coming.

Was it always like this after 1989? We can quickly identify several stages. In the 1990s, the role of mass media as an interface between politics and society was much more important: they imposed topics, promoted some political leaders, disqualified others. In 1990, 1992, and 1996, the fear of change/hope for change ratio dominated the presidential and parliamentary races, but on closer inspection, there are agendas and political identities asserting themselves that play a role in electoral mobilization.

After the political mystique of the first alternation was destroyed, the second stage came, in which we can talk about the personalization of politics: apart from the founding president Iliescu, the world listened with interest to the speech of a certain Iserescu (prime minister and presidential candidate). in 2000), Stoloyan (presidential candidate in 2000, then PNL president and short-term candidate again in 2004), Adrian Nestace (prime minister, PSD president, candidate in 2004), Traian Basescu (mayor general, PD president, head of state), Celin Popescu Tericanu (prime minister, PNL president), Crin Antonescu (PNL president, candidate 2009, interim head of state, 2012). In general, between 2000 and 2014, the political class uses the symbolic struggle and some political actors of the first decade. In addition to elections, accession to the EU is a legitimizing factor for all important players. The personalization of political life is a sign of the devitalization of parties and their removal from society, but the oratorical skills of the political actors mentioned above have created an acceptable political setting: there is political life, and society has or thinks it has guidelines. to understand it.

Personalization was supported by symbolic and ideological scaffolding. By the end of these periods, the anti-Besescu alliance, the USL, felt the need to legitimize itself with clearly identified projects: constitutional change, regionalization, and outwardly Eurosceptic accents. But the parties were emptied, their desire to go to society remained zero, they bet on locomotives, then they were destroyed by the fight against corruption: it became dangerous to be a locomotive.

A former Secret Service agent later said that politicians came to work. In the absence of parties, the state believed that it could govern itself. Either way, something was wrong with the personalization paradigm, or the electorate was simply fed up. Or both. Johannis is a clear sign of the desire to overcome the stage of personalization. The political and moral failures of PSD presidents Victor Ponta and Liviu Dragnius also confirm the entry into a new phase. The militarization that arose in the wake of the fight against corruption and the inability of parties to fulfill their constitutional functions is one of the explanations and characteristics of the new stage, but not the only one. Iohannis’s victories in 2014 and especially in 2019 are the result of a new normal in our political system: the head of state understands that the political discourse is no longer trustworthy, so he abandons his role as a guide. When he tries to influence the electorate in the 2016 legislature, the failure is dramatic. The weapon of discourse appears to be counterproductive.

Will the 2024 elections resemble the post-2012 elections? The answer to this question depends on the strategies of the parties, as well as on the impulses of the electorate, whose desire for change is too little taken into account today. The return to alignment seems to be aided by the fact that this is the first time since 2004 that presidential and parliamentary elections have been held in the same period. However, the landscape of party leaders does not favor this hypothesis. Prime Minister-President PSD Čolaku, despite the resources used, does not take off and, above all, has prospects for erosion, PNL President Ciucă is plausible only in the paradigm of a step forward to militarization, USR President Drula has not yet started, and the hesitation is precisely in itself risks – to make him a loser before he rushes. The dichotomous pair of Simion-Soshoake divides their electorate and cannot in themselves represent the personalization of the political scene, rather they are counterexamples. It is true that their position in the polls shows a significant resurgence of demand for politicians who are perceived as strong, but the approach and relative success of these two is based primarily on the type of transgressive political discourse that polarizes the protest vote.

The current taboo does not encourage us to believe that there will be a re-personalization, but there is a hypothesis of the emergence of new actors: the AUR and even the UDR can come with non-party candidates, that is self-publicity. Mirchi Joan, some even see him as a candidate for the savior of NLP, today nothing is impossible. Finally, there remains Codruța Koveși, which is not much talked about, probably because many still minimize the potential value of AUR. _ Read the rest of the article on Contributors.ro